ABSTRACT
Philosophy is a strange subject in that "What is philosophy?" is a persistent, endlessly contested question of philosophy itself. It plainly poses tendentious philosophical problems. Philosophers, both through most periods in the history of their subject and at the present time, have hotly, and without achieving much by way of agreement, disputed what philosophy is. Philosophers ask questions like what is knowledge, truth, causation, goodness, justice, ultimate reality, genuine evidence, morality, mind, body, God, freedom, and the like. Philosophical questions tend to be very general and in that way abstract. In short, philosophical propositions seem neither to be truths of logic or of mathematics or like such truths, nor experimental hypotheses or propositions establishable experimentally or observationally. However, distinctively philosophical propositions, e.g., "There are only particulars," "Forms are the ultimate reality," "Pleasure and only pleasure is intrinsically good," "God exists," or "Every event has a cause" are all very problematical.
